1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data processing apparatus that generates a signal used for reading print data from a predetermined storage unit, a printing apparatus, and a data processing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a printing apparatus using a print head having a printing element array consisting of printing elements, the head may be mounted in a manner inclined relative to a reference position because of, for example, a manufacturing error in manufacturing a head or a mounting error in mounting a head to an apparatus. To reduce displacement of a printing position caused by the inclination of the head, there is known a method in which null data that is irrelevant to printing of an image is added to a portion corresponding to a print start position and a portion corresponding to a print end position in print data, and the resulting data is stored in a storage unit. In this method, in reading data from the storage unit to transmit print data to the head, all data including the null data is read. This places a relatively heavy processing load and causes its processing time to be relatively longer.
To prevent this, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-143026 discloses a printing apparatus configured to read, from a storage unit, print data divided into predetermined units, add null data to the divided print data, and transmit the resulting data to the head such that the displacement of a printing position caused by inclination of a head is corrected.
In the printing apparatus of Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2010-143026, however, providing a dedicated circuit for the processing of combining the data as divided and the null data may make the circuit complicated and increase a cost of the apparatus as a whole. Therefore, it is preferable to reduce a processing load and a processing time without providing the dedicated circuit.